36. The Stoner

**note: I know I said I was done for the year, but I find myself with an excess of free time, which almost never happens. As a result, you’ll meet the rest of the matches, and the concluding posts will roll out gradually over the next week or so.

Let’s talk about ancient history before we dive into the present, shall we? You see, my high school self was quite fond of smoking weed. As often as I could get it and find the opportunity to smoke, I would. That all changed when I met My Ex in the middle of my senior year — he didn’t smoke, and I wasn’t so attached to weed that I wouldn’t abandon it for him, so I quit. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I smoked since I was 18, the last time being just over a decade ago when I went to a Halloween party hosted by my old high school friends. I ended up getting one of the worst migraines of my life the next morning, and even though I doubt the two things were related, it was a difficult association to break, which made my drug-free life a relatively easy choice.

Flash forward to the present: I am dressed nicely, my hair and makeup done, waiting impatiently on my couch for The Scientist to arrive, and it becomes apparent that he’s not coming. I experience a range of emotions: exasperation, frustration, hunger (is that an emotion?), self-pity, anger. I settle on defiance, and I jump on Tinder in a bid to find a new plan for my evening. After a frenzy of swiping, I tell my roommate I’m going to the liquor store and that she and I are having a movie night. We enjoy ourselves, though I’m a bit distracted from the movie, as a few of my matches have started messaging.

I end up making plans with The Stoner, an attractive guy around my age, and I tell him to come pick me up so we can go play pool at a nearby bar. It’s nearly midnight by this point, and he seems somewhat incredulous, but I’ve got my mind made up. I’m going out. We end up having a really fun time at the bar. When he drives me back to my place, I’m disappointed that our time together is over. He admits that he’s just going to snag a motel room nearby so that he doesn’t have to drive the 45 minutes back to his place. It’s after 2am by now. I ask if he wants company. He does.

When we get to the motel, he wants to smoke and asks if I want to join him. I politely decline, but he presses me a bit, and I think, “why the hell not?” It’s cold out, so we sit in his car — I only take a few hits, but the smoke surrounds us, and I feel myself getting very, very stoned. I am extremely quiet, nearly silent, and as The Stoner drones on (and on and on), a few things occur to me:

I’ve completely lost my grip on the passage of time.

I don’t remember that this is how it felt to be high…was this a bad idea?

I’ll bet the sex is going to be awful. I can’t feel anything.

When he exits the car, I float along behind him, wishing I had made different choices…like, lots of them. But when he kisses me, it’s as though the internal monologue is silenced completely. And I find out that I was wrong. Without my internal voice, I am free to enjoy sex in a way that my virginal high school self never knew. I lose track of how many times I reach orgasm. Everything feels incredible.

I saw The Stoner several more times, and while he was pleasant enough, and a capable and considerate lover, I never reached the heights of enjoyment I found in our first encounter. I took this to be a sort of universal truth about sex and drugs. Knowing that I didn’t want to become one of those people who needed to get high in order to get off, I decided that smoking wasn’t off the table, just not something that I’d pursue as a means to that particular end.